The Hand, the Eye and the Heart by Zoe Marriott

Author:Zoe Marriott [Marriott, Zoë]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781406389913
Publisher: Walker Books
Published: 2019-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

slammed the screen closed, gagging on the cloying, fetid stench of death. I staggered away, only realizing as I collided with the wall that my eyes had snapped shut. But it was no use. What I had seen was in my head now. I could still see it. I would always see it.

A man, middle-aged and dressed in clothes that were of fine quality, but well worn. A woman of around the same age. Probably his wife. A boy, lanky and only half grown – in his mid-teens. Their son, most likely. And a man in spotted armour. All dead. All dead, together, and already beginning, oh ancestors, beginning to bloat…

The middle-aged man’s throat had been cut. His blood had spilled over his desk as his body slumped over his papers. His wife – maybe she had tried to help her husband, or get away, but the Leopard’s man caught her. The bruises on her throat and wrists, her thighs, the way her fine gown had been ripped and left rucked up… There in the same room where her husband lay dead…

Perhaps her son had been somewhere else in the house and heard the screams? Something had brought him into the room. But he was only a boy. Only a boy.

I thought the mother had tried to fight, to protect him. There … there had been a bloodied paper knife clutched in her hand. But in the end it didn’t matter. They all died there. Murdered and murderer. Rotting together.

I raged for them, as I stumbled from that room of death. I raged for her. This woman, this mother, this stranger. For all she had been forced to do and see, and endure, and at the useless, meaningless way it had ended. We would have helped them. We should have helped them. Now they were all beyond anyone’s help.

I heard the echo of my mother’s voice crying out to me in the Stone Forest last night, and shuddered. Too late.

Light fell across my face. I opened my eyes, and found myself at the open doorway of another room. A weaving room. Smaller than the one in my home, but in every way familiar and ordinary and reassuring. Two looms, both strung with kesi tapestries – one complete, one unfinished – occupied the majority of the space. A beautiful thread box, inlaid with peonies in mother-of-pearl and shell, lay open as if in invitation, skeins of coloured silk neatly arranged and ready to be used.

A screen door to the ornamental garden outside was slightly open, and there were large, dusty boot prints on the otherwise carefully swept floor. This was how the murderer had crept in. The room was untouched by the chaos and violence beyond. The only trace of what had happened to its owner was the dust.

The rage inside me stilled – not dissipated but suddenly contained. As if in a trance I entered and sat before the larger loom. The incomplete tapestry was beautiful. A round panel with three vivid blue-and-copper flycatcher birds picking red berries from a branch.

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